Users often transcribe data from paper into an electronic form. For instance, a user may enter information from a paper financial statement into a program to generate a tax return, or a user may copy information from a paper invoice into an electronic inventory system. However, users often encounter problems when entering information from the paper form into an electronic form. For example, users may encounter difficulty in determining which field on the paper form corresponds to a requested field in the electronic form. Alternatively, a user may encounter difficulty in distinguishing desired data from instructions or other non-user-specific text on the paper form, or may become confused about the order in which data in the paper form should be entered into the fields in an electronic form. Such problems often lead to transcription errors during data entry.
Hence, what is needed is a method that facilitates data entry for forms without the above-described problems.